Vignettes
by fAtAlflAme
Summary: Snapshots of a ninja's life during war. Centres mainly around the Kakashi, Asuma, Gai, and Kurenai, and how their lives are all connected.


Vignettes 

_I don't own Naruto…unfortunately. Special thanks to Ryou VeRua for attempting to edit this, and for not making fun of my demented mind…too much. This has a few moments with some descriptive deaths, nothing major, but I figured you might like to know that. Not for anyone with a weak stomach and graphic mental images :P_

There are a number of times in their lives that seem to run together. Snapshots of moments that are indistinguishable from others, which blend together at the edges until they run equally like water. They are shinobi, elite ninja of the Hidden Village of the Leaf, and they are shadows on a bleak canvas, ready to be twisted into movement, set and poised to obey even the most disturbing orders. It is how they live. This is war.

A flash of silver hair bolts through the underbrush, a streak in the night. Holding a kunai in hand and awaiting his opportunity, the young genius Hatake Kakashi watches, eerily calm, for his signal. Brilliant as he is, he has been assigned a commander. They seem to have some issues trusting a 14 year old with any sharp object, no matter how well he's proved himself.

Footsteps pound behind him, and he whirls around. He is expendable, a tool in the hands of his village. _'Tell me to move, and I'll move. Tell me to sleep, tell me to eat, tell me to bathe…tell me to kill. I'm disposable, a soldier with no reason…' _He crouches, tense as he hears a sound. Maybe it's the signal he's waiting for. The signal that will indicate the end of today's slaughter, for him at least. Just one more to go and he can return to his home – if you can call it that – and sleep until tomorrow.

There's a snap, and a scream, and all too soon, blood flies through the air. Now, that isn't the signal he's waiting for. He recognizes the sound though. Recognizes the direction, and the familiar burst of fading chakra. The ninja is his commander, and he can't wait for a signal that won't come, so he moves. He hides an inappropriate giggle, his commander is dead, and he might also be dead soon if he keeps this up. _'Don't crack yet Hatake; you have to get through the rest of this first.'_ He thinks, chastising himself. It's still severely amusing though… so ironic that they assign him a commander because it's 'too dangerous', and while his commander is dead, he's completely unharmed.

He's rushing through the bushes, calm and collected, and restrains himself from stopping when he feels a surge of chakra from his other side. It's two of the kids he went to the academy with, and one set of chakra is fading fast. Ignoring them as he spots his target, he rushes a little faster, and gathers his chakra, forming the familiar ball in his hand and listening to the song of the birds. Chidori will do this job efficiently, and right now he just wants to go home.

A flash of light burns the skies, along with a piercing scream, and Maito Gai pauses in his attempts to heal his teammate to say a quick prayer for the creator of the brutally efficient attack.

There's a saying in Konoha. "Every time a leaf falls, its echo tears through the forest." It was supposed to have a message about how 'everyone counts,' but Gai never truly understood that until now. His comrade is dying, and his other comrade is dead, and his sensei is laying somewhere in the same forest, most likely fighting for his life, and there's blood and tears and sweat everywhere and he just _doesn't know what to do_ anymore. He's tried compression. He's tried pills and jutsus and even good old fashioned mouth-to-mouth but the soldier he's attempting to save just won't _breathe dammit._

Now there's tears rolling down his cheeks, and he's choking back sobs that shouldn't be there because he has to follow the twenty fifth rule of shinobi conduct if he ever hopes to surpass his eternal rival, but there's nothing else to do anymore. He's wondering if he's the only one to say _to hell with the rules_ tonight, and he highly doubts it, because there's so much blood, and so many bodies, and so much screaming that he's not sure if he's still alive right now. He's probably gone to hell for some reason or another, but he can't think of anything he's done that he's not supposed to, and killing is a sin, but so what, and Kakashi _did_ say that the green spandex would be his ticket to hell but he never believed him, and oh _Gods_ he can't breathe now.

He looks down at the ground, and spots something spectacular. There's a cigarette stub sitting there, and it could be from any number of shinobi, because it's their job to kill people, and that's stressful, and people decided it would be a good idea to smoke cigarettes to stop the stress. Somehow, that just doesn't occur to him, what occurs to him is Asuma, the only jounin who he'd gone to school with that had taken up smoking cigarettes. And, oh look, Asuma's walking by, and giving him a worried look, and then there's a senbon about to hit him, but the boy – man – move just in time, and now he's out of sight. Gai just can't bring himself to move now. Not yet. He's just so tired.

A sigh echoes through the trees, that only Asuma's selective hearing would pick up. He's not sure if he's imagining things, but he's pretty sure a green clad Gai was sitting there crying. He wishes he had the time to.

The trees are hard under his feet as he leaps between branches, and he's not sure he can keep this pace much longer, but he knows that if he stops he might end up like Gai, in shock, and that's no good. So Asuma keeps moving, and he stubs out his cigarette on a tree and throws it to the ground, and maybe, just maybe, he'll have another one in the pack in his pocket. He knows he just put out his last cigarette, but he needs something in his mouth, and he wonders briefly if the ninja chasing him will mind if he stops and asks to bum one.

There's an unnatural silence, and it's unnerving to Asuma. He knows his entire team is dead; he watched it happen, because their reflexes just weren't fast enough, and Sensei had to go and play the hero and try to save them. Now all of them are dead, their bodies half eaten away but the acid jutsu used on them, and their corpses are probably still sitting where he left them, smoke emanating from their gory wounds. He shakes his head to clear the unwelcome mental picture; he doesn't need that right now. He doesn't need this right now, so he stops running. He just…stops. He turns around, his hands forming seals, and he mouths the words, and all of a sudden, the shinobi is dead, laying on the ground, and he can't quite recollect what he's just done. He shrugs it off, and turns around, heading towards the village, heading towards _home._

He's back in the village now, passing his home, and going to hospital because he's pretty sure that there shouldn't be so much blood coming from his stomach, and, is that his small intestine he sees? The stark white walls are unpleasant, and he passes a room marked 'kunochi'. They're a group, not enough rooms to have individual ones, and as he passes the doorway, he spots a young girl sobbing on her bed. Kurenai. He keeps walking. How can he have sympathy for others when he doesn't have sympathy for himself?

Kurenai sees Asuma walk by, and doesn't call out, doesn't reach out like she wants to, because she's cold, and she just can't get warm. Her sensei is dead; his head rolled at least 6 feet before it finally hit a tree and stopped. Her team is dead, burnt up in a warm blaze of fire, fat bubbling and skin peeling back until… She retches. She can't do this. She'd jabbed her kunai into the enemy's heart, and it just didn't go far enough, and he'd grabbed her throat, and she'd pressed harder. She'd walked in with gloves of blood, warm on her freezing skin. They'd dragged her in; apparently the fact that she couldn't move her arm was a _bad_ thing.

They file into the hospital, one by one, physically broken, but mentally intact by their own standards. The nurses are whispering that the children are loosing their sanity, but they know it's a lie, because you can't loose something you never had, right?

_Be a good buddy and review please! (constructive criticism, ideas for new fics, compliments, and even flames are greatly appreciated )_


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